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The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham

Lucy Wadham's account of her 20 years of travails living in France married to a Frenchman and bringing up two children is the latest addition to the groaning sub-genre of books about British expats grappling with the baffling French. I myself moved to France three years ago and The Secret Life of France reads like a more eloquent version of the compare-and-contrast cafe chats that my British and American girlfriends and I often engage in. All the usual suspects of cliché and complaint are here: the crazy French driving, casual acceptance of adultery, "diabolical" pop music, libidinous politicians, obsession with the upkeep of la beauté, fuming encounters with recal­citrant petty bureaucrats, strikes and demos, anti-Arab racism, and intellectual pandering to abstract philosophers. "It did not take long," Wadham writes, "for me to realise that the French inhabit a different moral universe to ours."